Behind me I hear thin-rimmed wire wheels rolling across the dirt, and I turn and watch Tony push Paul in his wheelchair toward the white brilliance of the fire. Tony's green utilities are sun-faded, caked with salt, streaked with sweat and mud and fecal matter from a rice paddy. He wheels Paul into the burning doorway, and I try to stop them but my feet feel as though they're wired together, and my hand looks like a meaningless, outstretched claw.
Tony's utilities steam in the heat; then he and Paul both burst into flame like huge candles. The fire has sound now, the roar of wind in a tunnel, the whistle of superheated air cracking through wood, the resinous popping of everything that we are-skin and organ and bone.
But I am wrong about Tony and Paul. They have not found their denouement in a Vietnamese village. They emerge from the back of the fire and walk side by side into the jungle. Their bodies glow with a cool white brilliance, like a pistol flare's, that is interrupted intermittently by the trunks of trees and tangles of vine as they go deeper into the jungle. The tripping of my heart is the only sound in the clearing.
Tony leaned forward in the chair next to my bed, his head silhouetted against the early orange sun outside the window. He poked my shoulder with two stiff fingers.
"Hey, wake up," he said.
"What?"
"You're having a real mean one."
"What?" I was raised up on my elbows now.
"Do you always wake up with a chain saw in your head? Come on, get out of the rack. We got a lot to do today."
I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear, my forearms propped on my thighs. I rubbed my face and looked again at Tony, trying to disconnect him from the dream.
"Did you get crocked last night or something?" he said.
"No."
"All right, get dressed and let's eat breakfast."
"What's going on, Tony?"
"You're going with me and Paul over to our fishing camp in Mississippi."
"It's a school day, isn't it?"
"His school's closed for a couple of days. They've got to tear some asbestos out of the ceilings or something. You want to go or not?"
"I was going to do some things with Bootsie."
"Today you put her on hold."
"I don't think I want to do that."
"Yeah?"
"I'm meeting her for lunch, Tony."
"I owe you, I pay my debts. Are you interested or not?"
"What are you saying, partner?"
"Do you have your fifty K in place?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Don't worry, I can have it in an hour."
"So we eat breakfast, then you get it. At ten o'clock we're heading over for my camp. You're going to follow in your truck."
"This is all a little vague."
"You wanted the score. I'm giving you the score. It's a onetime offer. Are you in or out? Tell me now."
"I'm in. When's it going down?"
"You don't need to know that."
"Tony, I'm not sure I like being treated like a fish."
"I don't know when it's going down. That's something I'll find out later. I told you I don't deal with these guys as a rule. But you want the action, so I'm making an exception."
"Are you mad about something?"
"No, why?"
"You sound like you've got a beef."
"I'd already promised Paul to take him to the camp today. Then last night I got a message at one of my clubs about your deal. So I'm kind of mixing up business with a family trip. Which means I'm breaking one of my own rules, and I don't like that. But I don't go back on my word, either."
"I'll get dressed and pick up my money."
"Jess'll drive you."
"You think I'm going to leave town?" I tried to smile.
"No offense, Dave, but anyone who does business with me does it in a controlled environment. Anyone." He raised his eyebrows. They looked like grease-pencil lines drawn on his olive skin.
We ate cereal and toast and drank coffee in the glass-enclosed breakfast room while the Negro houseman helped Paul get dressed. The early sun had grown pale and wispy in the east, and clouds that were as black as oil smoke were forming in a bank over the Gulf.
"It might be a rough day for a fishing trip," I said.
"It'll blow over," he said.
He fiddled with his watchband, tinked his coffee spoon nervously against his saucer, looked out at the darkening line across the southern horizon. Then he said, "You know where Kim might be?"
"No."
"The manager at my club said she didn't come into work yesterday and she doesn't answer her phone. She didn't call you?"
"Why would she call me?"
"Because she digs you."
He fluttered his fingers on the tablecloth. "I'd better send a car out to her place," he said. His eyes were narrowed, and they looked out through the glass and roved around the backyard. "Maybe she split. Eventually most of them do. I thought she might be different."
"Don't worry about her. She's probably all right," I said.
One of Tony's bodyguards, a black-haired man of about twenty-five, came into the kitchen for coffee. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and his beltless brown slacks hung down low on his flat stomach. He looked at us without speaking, then filled his cup.
"Put a shirt on when you walk around the house," Tony said.
The man walked back into the dining room without answering.
"It's a frigging zoo," Tony said. "I treat people with respect, I pay them decent wages, and they try to wipe their frigging feet on me. You know, I got a cousin runs a lot of action in Panama City. His wife tells him one day he's a drag, he's overweight, he's got bad breath, he's got a putz the size of a Vienna sausage, that the only thing he ever did for her was crush her two feet into the mattress every night. So she dumps him and starts making it with this county judge who's on the pad with the____________________family in Tampa. Except she and the judge both get juiced out of their minds one night, and both of them get busted while she's blowing the judge in her Porsche behind his nightclub. She gets out of jail in the morning, hung over and trembling and her picture on the front page of the Panama City newspaper, and then she goes home and finds out my cousin had her Porsche towed back to her house, and she thinks maybe something's going right after all, my cousin's going to forgive her and square the sodomy charge with the city. Except she sees the Porsche is sitting flat on its springs because my cousin had a cement truck fill it up with concrete. I ought to take lessons from him."
He looked again at the sky and at the trees blowing in the yard. He opened his mouth and scratched the tautness of his cheek with his fingernail.
"What's eating you, Tony?" I said.
"Nothing."
"You haven't gotten back into pharmaceuticals, have you?" I smiled at him.
"I'm cool," he said.
"You don't have to go into this deal. Let it slide if it doesn't feel right," I said.
I watched his face. His eyes still roved the backyard. Back out, partner, I thought.
"I already committed you for fifty large," he said. "If you don't take it, I have to."
"I have to call Bootsie."
"I'll do it for you. While you go for your money with Jess. Nobody needs to know where we're going today, Dave."
"All right," I said. And there went my opportunity to tip Minos through the phone tap. Then I began to realize what was really on Tony's mind.
"I guess your little girl misses you," he said.
"Yes."
"After today it looks like you'll have everything you need to make your investors happy."
"I guess I will."
"To tell you the truth, Dave, I don't think I want to get into distribution over in Southwest Louisiana. There're too many potential problems there, conflicts with the Houston crowd. I don't need it."
"Suit yourself."
He didn't answer.
"I'll brush my teeth, then I'll be ready to go with Jess," I said.